Lani: Welcome to Sideways Times, a UK-based podcast in which we talk about the politics of disability and disability justice. Throughout this podcast I hope to have many conversations which deepen and broaden as well as challenge our understanding of how to work against ableism and how this connects to other struggles.

I am Lani Parker and in this edition I talk to Hamja Ahsan about his book Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. We discussed what influenced the book, the use of humour in the book and in art in general, and how the themes relate to issues of racism and ableism, as well as some more things. I hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think.

Lani: Hi Hamja, thank you for coming to meet me. To start with could you tell me a bit about Shy Radicals and how it came about?

Hamja: So Shy Radicals has something I feel has always existed in me as a form of coping with feeling excluded and demeaned and bullied I guess, through what I call extrovert supremacist culture. It became a book last year, published by Bookworks – it’s an artist’s writing publisher. They’ve published people like Lubaina Himid, Liam Gillick and Jeremy Deller and then they’re like one of the best I think experimental publishers. And there’s a series called Common Objectives which is edited by an activist called Nina Power, who you might know through organisations like Defend the Right to Protest, or the Alfie Meadows campaign, and feminist philosophy. And she selected this as part of the series. So the way I’ve conceptualised my own feelings of inferiority and being bullied through being someone who is going to be the more awkward shy or quiet person in the room and thinking in a way of… not seeing it as something to be corrected but a different mode of being. I guess the questions which are often around the term neurodiversity and the way many people with Asperger’s Syndrome or autistic spectrum, and forms of resisting mental health diagnosis and medical models of mental disability, and reclaiming them as different ways of being. So I made up a revolutionary political party which would be like the Black Panthers but for shy people. Continue reading “Shy Radicals: An interview with Hamja Ahsan”